ISHMAEL REED What's American About America? The African-American novelist, poet, editor, and essayist Ishmael Reed was bom in 1938 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Known for his satiric wit, Reed abolishes time and rearranges history in his novels to create and revive a special kind of black folklore that includes magic and voodoo. With the aesthetic he calls “Neo-HooDoo” he has parodied genre fiction such as westerns and mysteries. Flight to Canada (19761 is a farcical treatment of slavery; Japanese by Spring (1993) satirizes aca- demic posturing over multiculturalism. among other issues. Besides editing and publishing several volumes of poetry and essays, Reed has produced a video soap opera and founded a publishing company devoted to the work of unknown ethnic artists. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. “What's American About Amer- ica?” is reprinted from the March-April 1989 Utne Reader. A longer version originally appeared in Reed’s Writin’ Is Fightin’ (1983). As Reed suggests in this essay, the United States is not the \VASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) society of Norman Rockwell paintings. Indeed, white Americans may become a minority in the twenty-first century. Census statistics show that already one out of four Americans is nonwhite or Hispanic. Immigration and birth rates indicate that by the year 2000. the collective population of Hispanics, Asians, and blacks «ill have doubled. while the white population will have increased by only a few percent. In some parts of the country — California schools, for example — a nonwhite majority is already a reality. As more and more Americans recognize the diversity of our population and heritage, ques- tions such as What language do we speak? What holidays do we observe? and Who are our heroes? challenge the Anglo-Saxon bias in our culture An item from the New York Times, June 23, 1983: “At the annual Lower East Side Jewish Festival yesterday, a Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of Ty Thuan Duc’s Vietnamese grocery store. Beside her a Spa ish-speaking family patronized a cart with two signs: ‘Italian [ces and ‘Kosher by Rabbi Alper. And after the pastrami ran out, eversbody ate knishes.” On the day before Memorial Day, 1983, a poet called me to describe a city he had just visited. He said that one section included mosques. built by the Islamic people who dwelled there. Attending his reading, he said, were large numbers of Hispanic people, 40,000 of whom lived in+ ‘The West and the World the same city. He was not talking about a fabled city located in some mysterious region of the world. The city he'd visited was Detroit. A few months before, as I was visiting Texas, I heard the taped voice used to guide passengers to their connections at the Dallas Airport an- nouncing items in both Spanish and English. This trend is likely to continue; after all, for some southwestern states like Texas, where the largest minority is now Mexican-American, Spanish was the first written language and the Spanish style lives on in the western way of life. Shortly after my ‘Texas trip, I sat in a campus auditorium at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee as a Yale professor — whose origi- nal work on the influence of African cultures upon those of the Americas has led to his ostracism from some intellectual circles — walked up and down the aisle like an old-time Southern evangelist, dancing and drum- ming the top of the lectern, illustrating his points before some Afro-Ameri- can intellectuals and artists who cheered and applauded his performance. The professor was “white.” After his lecture, he conversed with a group of Milwaukeeans — all of whom spoke Yoruban, though only the profes- sor had ever traveled to Africa. One of the artists there told me that his paintings, which included African and Afro-American mythological symbols and imagery, were hanging in the local McDonald’s restaurant. The next day I went to McDonald's and snapped pictures of smiling youngsters eating hamburg- ers below paintings that could grace the walls of any of the country’s leading museums. The manager of the local McDonald's said, “I don’t know what you boys are doing, but I like it,” as he commissioned the local painters to exhibit in his restaurant. Such blurring of cultural styles occurs in everyday life in the United States to a greater extent than anyone can imagine. The result is what the above-mentioned Yale professor, Robert Thompson, referred to as a cultural bouillabaisse. Yet members of the nation’s present educational and cultural elect still cling to the notion that the United States belongs to some vaguely defined entity they refer to as “Wester civilization,” by which they mean, presumably, a civilization created by people of Europe, as if Europe can even be viewed in monolithic terms. Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which includes Turkish marches, a part of Western civilization? Or the late-nineteenth- and bwenticth-century French paint- ings, whose creators were influenced by Japanese art? And what of the cubists, through whom the influence of African art changed modem painting? Or the surrealists, who were so impressed with the art of the Pacific Northwest Indians that, in their map of North America, Alaska dwarfs the lower forty-eight states in size?Reed / What's American About America? Are the Russians, who are often criticized for their adoption of “West. ern” ways by Tsarist dissidents in exile, members of Western civilization? And what of the millions of Europeans who have black African and Asian ancestry, black Africans having occupied several European countries for hundreds of years? Are these “Europeans” a part of Western civilization? Or the Hungarians, who originated across the Urals in a place called Greater Hungary? Or the Irish, who came from the Iberian Peninsula? Even the notion that North America is part of Westem civilization because our “system of govemment” is derived from Europe is being challenged by Native American historians who say that the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin especially, were actually influenced by the system of government that had been adopted by the Troquois hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Europeans. ‘Western civilization, then, becomes another confusing category — like Third World, or Judeo-Christian culture — as humanity attempts to impose its small-screen view of political and cultural reality upon a complex world. Our most publicized novelist recently said that Western civilization was the greatest achievement of mankind — an attitude that flourishes on the street level as scribbles in public restrooms: “White Power,” “Niggers and Spies Suck,” or “Hitler was a prophet.” Where did such an attitude, which has caused so much misery and depression in Our national life, which has tainted even our noblest achievements, begin? An attitude that caused the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens during World War I, the persecution of Chicanos and Chinese Americans, the near-extermination of the Indians, and the murder and lynchings of thousands of Afro-Americans. “_ The Puritans of New England are idealized in our schoolbooks as the first Americans, “a hardy band” of no-nonsense patriarchs whose disci- pline razed the forest and brought order to the New World {a term that annoys Native American historians). Industrious, responsible, it was their “Yankee ingenuity” and practicality that created the work ethic. ‘Th ns, however, had a mean streak. They hated the theater and ristmas. They punished people in a cruel and inhuman man- ner. They killed children who disobeyed their parents. They exterminated the Indians, who had taught them how to survive in a world unknown to them. And their encounter with calypso culture, in the form of a servant from Barbados working in a Salem minister's household, resulted in the witchcraft hysteria, The Puritan legacy of hard work and meticulous accounting led to the establishment of a great industrial society, but there was the other side — ‘the strange and paranoid attitudes of that society toward those different \ from the elect.6 ‘The West and the World ‘The cultural attitudes of that early elect continue to be voiced in everyday life in the United States: the president of a distinguished uni- versity, writing a letter to the Times, belittling the study of African civili- zations; the television network that promoted its show on Vatican art with the boast that this art represented “the finest achievements of the human. spirit.” When I heard a schoolteacher wam the other night about the invasion of the American educational system by foreign curricula, 1 wanted to yell at the television set, “Lady, they're already here.” It has already begun because the world is here. The world has been arriving at these shores for at least 10,000 years from Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the late nineteenth and carly twentieth centuries, large numbers of Europeans artived, adding their cultures to those of the European, African, and Asian settlers who were already here, and recently millions have been entering the country from South America and the Caribbean, making Robert Thompson's bouillabaisse richer and thicker. North America deserves a more exciting destiny than as a repository of “Western civilization.” We can become a place where the cultures of the world crisscross. This is possible because the United States and Canada are unique in the world: The world is here. EXPLORATIONS What are the defining qualities of a “cultural bouillabaisse” (para. 6)? How does this image of the United States differ from the frequently cited “melting pot"? - What reasons does Ishmael Reed give for disputing “the notion that the United States belongs to .. ." Western civilization” (para. 6)? What evidence does he give that “the nation’s present educational and cultural eleet still cling” to that notion? Do you think he needs more evidence for that accusation? Why or why not? What is the thesis of Reed's essay? What recommendations does he make, and to whom?